Running on faith

The disappointing Padres offense wasted a fantastic outing by Mike Clevinger and raised more questions about their ability to score runs.

This has got to be one of the most perplexing teams, and seasons, in San Diego Padres history.

After a 3-1 home loss to the Cleveland Guardians, the Padres have now scored 9 runs over their last 5 games. There is absolutely no reason why a team with this much hitting talent in the lineup should be averaging less than 2 runs scored per game.

Sure, they occasionally pop for a big one, like the 10-3 win that kept them from being swept by the god awful Miami Marlins, but it never seems to do much. It never starts the hot streak. The bats get hot for a day or two and go right back to being ice cold.

If this were 2021, we would be blaming Jayce Tingler and probably Eric Hosmer. If it were a couple years before that, we’d be making complaints about the holes in the lineup dragging everyone else down. Neither one of those excuses work now. As a matter of fact, outside of “sometimes they attack fastballs and sometimes they don’t”, it’s damn near impossible to figure out why the 2022 Padres can’t get their offense going.

(Side note: I’m well aware that the umpiring was gross last night and that the Padres face a lot of gross umpires during the season. So do all of the teams in baseball. Umpires are bad but at least the playing field, over the course of the season, is relatively level. The Padres don’t get it any worse than anybody else, so I’m going to skip talking about the umps today.)

The guys in the lineup have a track record. We can definitively say they’re good. We’re not fooling ourselves, and the same can be said for the manager. There’s no reason why this team shouldn’t be better than this.

The Padres have scored 546 runs so far this season. They rank 13th in runs score per game. 13th doesn’t sound too bad, right? That’s a little above league average so how bad could it be? Well…

They Padres rank 5th in MLB payroll this season. Once they find a way to sign Juan Soto to a contract extension and Tatis’ back-loaded contract goes up in value, the Padres will likely be one of the top 2 or 3 payrolls in all of baseball. Personally, I don’t think they should have an offense that’s comparable to these teams that are somewhere between .500 and 10 games below .500.

Outside of the starting pitching, not much has gone right for the Padres this year. They’re on their (*counts fingers*) 5th closer of the season despite rostering the two best closers in baseball this season. The lineup could be the 1927 Yankees’ and it would still, somehow, only get you one game a week where it scores more than two runs.

My hope for this team has reached the point in the season where it’s running on fumes. Or maybe it’s even less than that. Maybe I’m just running on faith. I’m not ready to give up on them because, quite honestly, there’s no good reason for me to do so. They still have a really good chance of making the playoffs and doing damage, but at some point it has to be less about what their chances are and more about what they’re actually doing on the field.